Drought, death and taxes

Six million Ethiopians are going hungry. The weather, and a war, are to blame

A GREAT lake stretches across the desert, shimmering enticingly. Unfortunately, it is a mirage. The Afar region of Ethiopia, perhaps the hottest inhabited place on earth, is even drier than usual this year, and the people who live there have run out of food. Their beloved cows lie dead and dying in the hot sand. Many of the carcasses are so fresh that the storks and hyenas have not yet had time to peck or chew them clean.

In much of eastern, southern and northern Ethiopia, the rains have been rotten this year. In all, 5.9m of Ethiopia's 65m people need food aid or other assistance, according to the World Food Programme. The food shortage is not as terrible as the one in southern Africa. Nor is it as disastrous as the famine Ethiopia suffered in the mid-1980s. Ethiopia's current government is not indifferent to human suffering in the way its old Marxist dictatorship was, or Zimbabwe's government now is.

Nonetheless the situation is grim. Among the worst affected are the Afars, a tough, gun-toting people who subsist by herding livestock in the arid vastness of north-eastern Ethiopia. The Afars are almost all poor, but like most pastoralists, they have developed sophisticated methods for avoiding starvation. Their only assets are their animals, but they diversify their portfolios, so to speak, by breeding cows, goats, camels and sheep. Cows are a high-risk, high-yield investment. They breed fast and produce lots of milk, but they are the first beasts to die in a drought. Goats are scrawnier, but hardier. Camels are the toughest of all, but breed slowly. Afars have insurance, too, in their kinship ties. In hard times, those with spare livestock share with those who have not.

Despite all these precautions, Afars are often malnourished. Their nomadic traditions fiercely discourage them from settling down, but many have grown desperate enough to start rearing maize as well as cows and camels. Most years, these “agro-pastoralists” have enough to eat, but this year even they are suffering.

“All our cows died, and the ground is too dry to grow maize,” says Muhammad Oumar, a skinny father of four, squatting in the dust by a treeful of yellow orioles. Hunger has not yet turned to starvation in his village; the villagers hike 20km (12 miles) to Assaita, the nearest town, to sell woven mats or firewood and buy flour. But there is not enough to go around, and malnutrition has made many vulnerable to disease.

Children have no milk, and must make do instead with a thin porridge made from teff, an indigenous grain. The 15 households in Mr Oumar's village look after 20 orphans between them. In another nearby village of 100 homes, 13 people have perished in the past month, according to Muhammad Hassan, a peasant with sunken, cavernous cheeks. “We need food,” he says, “or we're going to die.”

The immediate cause of Ethiopia's food crisis is the weather. But political factors play a role, too. After Ethiopians shook off their Marxist overlords in 1991, food production rose steadily. But between 1998 and 2000, a pointless war with neighbouring Eritrea stymied progress.

Strong young men were summoned from their fields and sent to the front line. Tens of thousands of people were killed, and perhaps 350,000 forced to flee their homes. Families with members on both sides of the border were separated. Flour mills, bridges, power lines and irrigation systems were destroyed. Most aid was frozen. In all, the war cost Ethiopia $2.9 billion, according to the Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute, a private think-tank. That is almost a whole year's output for every farmer in Ethiopia; and more than 80% of the population live on farms.

Wanted: rain, aid and tax cuts

Another problem, strangely, is tax. Ethiopia abandoned feudalism in the 1970s, when the emperor, Haile Selassie, was murdered, but the old feudal habit of taxing peasants persists. The most irksome levy is payable on the land that peasants till, which they are not allowed to own, because the government owns all the land. The sums involved are small, but do not seem so to those who pay them. Mr Oumar usually hands over 60 birr ($7) a year, which he describes as “heavy”. The average Ethiopian income is only $100 a year, but most peasants earn far less.

Tax-collectors generally make an exception for those who are on the verge of starving: this year, Mr Oumar was let off. They tend not to tax nomads either, partly because they are hard to trace, and partly because so many carry submachineguns. But taxes levied on peasants in years when the harvest is good make it hard for them to accumulate a surplus to see them through the bad years.

What is more, taxes must be paid in cash, shortly after harvest time. To raise this cash, peasants all take their spare crops to market at the same time, which depresses prices and means they have to sell more of their crop to meet their tax bill. The tax raises negligible sums for the government (only 1% of total annual revenues), but inflicts serious harm on the most vulnerable Ethiopians. “If we don't pay,” laments Mr Oumar, “they say they'll take our land.”